Interview with Sarah Luppen Fowler, Senior Deputy General Counsel at SAG-AFTRA

Sarah Luppen Fowler is Senior Deputy General Counsel at SAG-AFTRA, the nationwide labor union representing approximately 160,000 members of the film, television, news, music, and radio industries. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School and the University of Georgia School of Law, where she teaches a course about the intersection of entertainment and labor law. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School.

JSEL’s Alec Winshel sat down with Ms. Fowler to discuss her work at SAG-AFTRA, including her leadership in the recent labor strike, and her legal career spanning multiple law firms.

Alec Winshel: Can you start by telling us what your current role [as Senior Deputy General Counsel] looks like and how your responsibilities have changed over the course of your time with SAG-AFTRA?

Sarah Luppen Fowler: As Senior Deputy General Counsel, I report directly to our general counsel. I am mainly tasked with a lot of department management. I also do some of your more typical GC-type work by interfacing with our People and Culture department and working with them on internal employee and internal union matters—some of our staff are themselves unionized, so I act as management in those negotiations with those unions. I also will manage with outside counsel any larger pieces, so any litigations that are filed against SAG-AFTRA: I’ll usually be the point person with outside counsel on those matters. Any larger matters we’re bringing, those will be ones that I’ll be point on. And, then, generally approving any major policy decisions and being part of those discussions from the legal perspective.

In addition to that, I headed up the legal side of our strike this past summer, so that added a new arrow to my quiver. Now, I’m sort of a ‘strike person.’ Whenever we have negotiations that aren’t particularly going the way our membership would like, we do now make sure we’re always preparing for strike and so I will get involved at that point and help them feel like they’re prepared to strike if we end up having to take that step.

Winshel: Can you talk about that transition process—I believe it had been decades since SAG-AFTRA had struck—so you may not have had people in the organization that you could learn from as you were putting it together?

Fowler: Nobody was around anymore from the last time we struck that contract. We’ve had a couple of strikes more recently, but not under TV/Theatrical agreement, so they weren’t these nationwide, huge strikes that shut down the entire industry.

We had a few people and a few models for some of the documents that we would need, but just logistically speaking, that was something we learned on the fly. We were building the airplane in the air.

It was super exciting and super stressful, but really rewarding and a fun way to exercise all the things that you learn as a lawyer: thinking quickly on your feet and think practically and problem solve and doing it all at once with a lot on the line. It was very exciting, but something that lent itself to lawyer leadership and was a great experience.

Winshel: I want to ask a couple questions about the trike. There have been a lot of headlines about the success that came out of those negotiations about compensation, writers’ room size, and AI. Are there other wins that you got as an organization that you’d like to highlight?

Fowler: One thing that, in hindsight, we’ll look back on and see as a huge success was SAG-AFTRA’s ability to break what’s known as pattern bargaining. In the industry, you have the Writer’s Guild, the Director’s Guild, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE. Whoever goes first will set the table, and then each guild that comes after that is expecting to accept that pattern and go along with what the first guild who negotiates agrees to. That can be beneficial but oftentimes is quite limiting because each guild is very different and their membership is different and they have different needs and different requirements based on what they’re doing to put the movie or TV show together.

What we were able to do is break that in some significant ways this time. SAG-AFTRA needed more compensation because our members are more likely to be paid at scale than the writers and directors are, so we needed that minimum scale to be raised a lot more following several years of record inflation than, maybe, the writers and directors needed. That was a huge thing.

Also, changing the structure of how residuals might be paid in streaming and getting that to a point where our members felt comfortable was different. It’s not that it’s better or worse; it’s what made our members feel most comfortable with our payment would be made going forward. That’s huge. That means that the voice that we bring to the table is being heard and the companies can no longer say, “Well, the writers said this was okay, so you need to take it.” No. They need to listen to our perspectives. It’s unique and it’s different and we may have a reason why what we need is different than the others. That’s really helpful and we’ll put that to the test as IATSE is negotiating right now. They have different needs and a unique voice and perspective on what that is. We’ll see if they’re able to break through that in these negotiations.

Winshel: There are so many different guilds involved in the industry that have different sets of needs. SAG-AFTRA alone has more than 150,000 members that work in different parts of the industry. How do you represent so many different people at once?

Fowler: We have a lot of staff who are excellent, and who are subject matter experts in their various fields. That’s one thing, and probably the most important thing.

We’re a huge union. We need a lot of people serving that union, and excellent people who know that particular subset: whether its music and sound recordings, whether its broadcasters, local stations, DJs. We have experts in all of those areas who can service those individuals. We have a special background actor department. All of those things are really important. You’re right—they do have very different day-to-day lives in the industry.

But, right now, AI affects all of our members significantly. We also see these themes like AI, fair compensation that really affect everyone. We make sure that all of us are experts in that. We’re all experts in AI right now because it’s affecting every one of our members.

Winshel: I’m curious about what the future of the unions looks like in an entertainment industry that is increasingly fragmented across Twitch streamers, upstart TikTokers, or run-and-gun YouTube productions. What is the strength of the union and the structure of the union look like in the future?

Fowler: I’m sure there are folks out there who might take a negative view but, from what I’m seeing, union are having more and more impact as the industry, in some ways, fragments and, in some ways, gets more vertically aligned as less players survive in the industry.

What we’re seeing is this younger generation who’s on YouTube, on TikTok, who is an influencer and who really believe in collective action. They want to feel protected and valued in their chosen profession. They are seeing that unions are the way that they can achieve that best because they’re just one tiny part of this huge ecosystem. They don’t have leverage alone. If they come together in a collective, then they do.

I think that people are seeing more and more value in unions. We’re getting more and more leverage and traction with these younger groups of people who really see the benefit and are joining.

Winshel: I’d love to hear about your career before you got to SAG-AFTRA. You worked at a few law firms before your current organization. Can you talk about those roles, and how you decided to move from organization to organization?

Fowler: I started in your traditional Big Law: I was at Simpson Thatcher & Barlett in Los Angeles in their litigation department. I graduated in 2008, so for those who can connect those dots, that was when we had the Great Recession. Not a great time to graduate law school. There were huge law firms and banks failing. That landscape shaped the beginning of my career because a lot of what I was doing as a young lawyer was working on the fallout from these bank failures and representing boards of directors and the CEO in these actions related to their having to close. I didn’t even really understand what a mortgage was! I had gone straight from college to law school to Big Law. It really crystalized for me that, while the law is very important, equally important is understanding the facts of the case and the industry that your client works in and understanding their perspective and decisions. It was fascinating to talk to the in-house people who we represented and that planted the seed for me that I wanted to be one of those people who were part of the decision making at the outset with the business people. You can make such a difference as a lawyer by being part of that conversation at the front end, instead of just coming in at the back end, which is what litigation is.

That was intense but I met the best lawyers I know in that job: excellent lawyers that are mentors to this day. I felt like I learned what it was to be a good attorney and a good litigator there. I really valued that experience. But, I knew I didn’t want to be a partner at a big law firm. After five years, I looked to go more on the entertainment side.

I went to a brand-new entertainment litigation boutique. I was their first hire. They mainly focused on representing talent in right of privacy and right of publicity litigation, so protecting talent from unauthorized uses of their name and image in commercial ads. That is what started me on my path towards SAG-AFTRA. It’s been very useful now with AI to have this background in the misuse of someone’s name and image.

The thing that really came to highlight my career there was that we also had a client, Hulk Hogan, who was suing Gawker Media at the time for an unauthorized posting of a surreptitiously recorded sex tape of him with his best friend’s wife. That case could be a whole class. It was really fascinating to work on that at that time: it was some of the beginning of us as a society trying to navigate where those line were. What is news? What gets the protections of news? What is entertainment? What is an invasion of privacy in this era where we’re putting so much online? How do those things meet together? It was an intense case to have such a brand-new, small firm working on it. I learned a lot about just taking a case soup-to-nuts and gained a lot of confidence in myself as an attorney. At a small firm, you’re really responsible for the work product and that was helpful to me as an attorney to gain the confidence and ability to do that and to feel confident in the final product being mine.

Then, I took a break. I got married. I started networking to see how I could go in-house. Thankfully, I’d been involved in the LA County Bar Association as a young lawyer and a leader. I’d been on the Board of Trustees with Duncan Crabtree-Ireland who, at the time, was SAG-AFTRA’s General Counsel. I reached out to him to see what next steps might be for me. He said, “You should come work for me. You’ve been representing talent one individual at a time, and you can come work for me and represent 160,000 people in the entertainment industry every single day and make quite a difference.” He was very convincing. That’s what I did! I went in-house with SAG-AFTRA and I’ve been there ever since.

Winshel: You mentioned mentors. Can you talk more about what the role of mentorship had been for you on both sides of that dynamic?

Fowler: For me, having mentors is what’s made me a good lawyer. I learned a lot in law school and I don’t mean to discredit that, but it’s the one-on-one mentor relationship in the legal field that connected the dots. Having people who I saw were excellent in their field, and then attaching myself to them and learning from them and talking to them and hearing their thought process. Brilliance isn’t an immediate thing as a lawyer. You have to talk it out. Being there as they talked it out really helped me develop my own internal thought process. That’s one thing.

In addition, mentors just make it for fun. If you have someone who you admire, and who loves what they do and they’re really good at it, there’s nothing like that. That is what’s fun about showing up at the job every day. They get everyone excited. It’s a team mentality. We’re all learning. We’re all celebrating the wins. We’re all a part of the process. It kept me practicing. Unfortunately, a lot of young lawyers don’t find that and they leave the practice too early.

I try to pay it forward. It made me pretty good at what I do, and so I try to do the same for lawyers who come up under me. We talk about the strategy and why I think what I think. I make sure that they feel comfortable telling me what they think, so they can start developing their own voice and their own thought process. It’s an incredibly important part of the practice.

Winshel: I want to take it back to the beginning. You graduated from Vanderbilt Law. Can you talk about what activities dominated your time in law school and what excited you the most during that period?

Fowler: I was really involved in mock trial and moot court. That was something I really liked. I did mock trial in high school. I came back to that and found that was where my strengths were in law school. I wanted to find ways that I could develop that confidence in the practice and that was where I found it: getting on my feet and presenting. Those were things that I was able to shine in and really enjoyed, so that’s what I focused on. Well, I focused on class, mostly, but outside of class I focused on those two activities. I do think they helped me get that first job.

Winshel: What are the other unique parts of law school that don’t show up in the practice that we, as students, can value more while we’re here?

Fowler: Networking. I was at Vanderbilt and then came to Los Angeles. Very few people from Vanderbilt go the West Coast; it’s just not a common path. I immediately realized, “Oh no… all these people who went to UCLA and USC have this whole network already built in.” I felt like I didn’t know anything about what was going on in the practice in LA. That felt very limiting, and that’s why I immediately got involved in the LA County Bar Association. I needed to build a network that wasn’t already built in for me. That turned out really well.

Now, the Vanderbilt community from my class has rekindled because everyone is now at this level where we do have more influence nationally, and you don’t have to be so locally connected in your field. I have a good friend who’s a great labor lawyer on the management side, and she’s out of Chicago, and we run into each other all the time now.

Cement your network now because they really come in handy at the beginning of your practice, and later on. It’s good to know people. You are getting to know each other now. Don’t just know the people in your group. You need to know everybody; you don’t know exactly where your career is going to take you. I didn’t know I was going to be a labor lawyer when I was in law school. That’s something that people don’t always think about.

Winshel: Something I hear from people who graduated fifteen years ago, compared to now, is that there are larger entertainment communities on campuses today. How can students take advantage of the rise of entertainment law?

Fowler: Vanderbilt was early to the entertainment field. When I was there, they did have a journal of entertainment and technology law and there were some classes that focused on entertainment. In IP classes, they would talk about entertainment in that context. That was great. I do think that’s because they’re located in Nashville and there’s a big music industry there.

I was shocked by how many people wanted to come and take a class that I teach at the University of Georgia about entertainment and labor law. I realized that Atlanta, also, has become this big hub of entertainment in both music and film/television. I that the industry isn’t as focused just in LA and New York; it has moved across the country. That has meant more interest in the field and I think that’s really exciting. Also, with COVID and everyone being able to work remotely, nobody feels limited by geography. I think that’s exciting it: that opens everyone up to more talent and more understanding of the industry, not just limited to those of us that are crazy enough to move to New York or LA right after law school.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.